“There is something particularly lonely about being in your mid-twenties.” I was recently scrolling through TikTok, when I came across a video with that caption; and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Because it addressed something that I’ve been struggling with for a while now. While watching the video, I was hoping the girl was going to offer some novelty advice on how to cope with loneliness or how she went about making friends, but it ended up being a “stitch” with a life coach offering her services to young women to help them make friends. So I quickly lost interest.

But the overarching message of the video has stayed with me: that it’s very challenging to find and make new friends in your early to mid-twenties. And that I’m not entirely alone in encountering this challenge, as I had spent a good while believing. But the persistent question has been why is that the case?

I have several theories.

The first is that for people who have had a traditional education, their early to mid-twenties is the first point in their lives in which they are not enrolled in any sort of schooling. When they’re in school, especially in the K-12 environment, it is incredibly easy to make friends considering that they are around the same cohort of people for 13 to 14 years. In college, it can be slightly more challenging to make friends because that forced togetherness is gone; but interacting with people in classes, dorm life and extracurricular activities does foster a similar environment to some extent.

For me, who attended school primarily through a screen from kindergarten through grad school, making friends has always been challenging because I didn’t have the luxury of being around my peers on a daily basis. I made my first best friend when I was two, and I’m fortunate to still call her one of my closest friends to this day. I made my next best friend when I was in first grade, and I’m also still friends with her to this day. These two women were the extent of my experiences with friendship throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood.

I was fortunate to encounter such strong examples of friendship so early in my life because for much of my teenage years, they were my only view into the outside world. I valued that season of friendship more than the words on this page will be able to express because through my interactions with them, I was allowed to feel like a normal, teenage girl. As someone who spent the majority of my days around nurses — the ages of my mother or grandmother — feeling like I was normal, in any respect was rare for me. “Normal” was also something that I craved to be more than anything.

When I started my undergraduate career and started growing slightly apart from my friends because of our respective academic endeavors I couldn’t ignore the gnawing feeling that I was missing out on something. Not that I had any desire to inject myself into the party culture that dominates every college, but I was hoping to make friends, somehow. Still, it’s incredibly hard to make friends when you’re behind a screen and everyone else is physically in a classroom. Seeking friendship among like-minded individuals is what originally drew me to become involved with several student-led publications because I was deeply craving a sense of camaraderie. I was able to find it to some extent during those experiences, but then again, it is also hard to make friends when you only see these people in meetings and only interact with them to turn in articles on deadlines.

Interestingly enough, the most valuable friendship that I made during my undergraduate experience was with one of my professors. Once I graduated, she and I have continued to stay in touch, and she is kind enough to look over these columns every month before they make their way to all of you. But in my darkest moments, I have wondered if my inability to make friends stems from something being inextricably wrong with me. Is some part of me so unlikeable that people my age can sense it and steer clear of me?

This brings me to my next theory about why making friends in the early to mid-twenties is so challenging: perhaps it’s because people are in all different stages of life. Some people are married and have kids, some — like my friends — are in long-term relationships, and then there’s me, who has never been in a relationship and is in graduate school, trying to launch my career.

When all is said and done, I’ve come to the conclusion that friendship can be found in many places. I’ve been fortunate enough to have some young nurses come into my life, and they are now some of my closest friends because I spend so much time with them.

And I think the type of friendships that we make throughout our lives evolve. That’s the whole point of them — to enhance our lives at whatever stage we may happen to be.

Gazette columnist Joanna Buoniconti is a freelance writer and editor. She is currently pursuing her master’s at Emerson College. She can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.